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DANCE

DANCE; Cyd Charisse's Dance Card Is Full Once More

By ANNA KISSELGOFF

Published: April 5, 1992

Do you remember when Felia Sidorova (or was it Maria Istomina?) blew smoke in Gene Kelly's face in "Singin' in the Rain"? Cyd Charisse, born Tula Ellice Finklea but alias Istomina and Sidorova in her teen-aged Ballet Russe days, is the only dancer who could make a pirouette look sexy.

Little girls who saw Miss Charisse at her dancing peak in the film musicals of the 1940's and 50's dreamed of becoming ballerinas. Little boys and big ones too simply dreamed of her. What man did not envy Mr. Kelly when he hung his hat on an instep that the camera purringly revealed to be part of a fabulously extended Charisse leg? Censors were omnipresent on movie lots, but "we got away with murder in those days because it was dance," Miss Charisse said on a recent day off from performing in "Grand Hotel."

For all the scattered news generated by her belated Broadway debut at the age of 70, her performances in the Tommy Tune musical have little to do with what could be called the international rediscovery of Cyd Charisse. An instant nostalgia for the heyday of the great American musical has suddenly made her its most dazzling symbol.

In 1990, Europe's major dance festival, the Lyons International Dance Biennial, honored her and the director Stanley Donen in a tribute to musical comedy. The same year, on a Parisian television documentary, she explained the Hollywood musical to the French. Last year, she was guest of honor with Mr. Donen and her husband, the singer Tony Martin, when the Haifa International Film Festival focused on M-G-M musicals.

Even Janet Jackson, the pop star, recently paid homage to Miss Charisse by including her in a rock video. The 30-second dance spot was choreographed by Michael Kidd, who created the memorable dances for Miss Charisse and Fred Astaire in the 1953 film "The Band Wagon" and who, like Miss Charisse, came from the world of classical ballet. "Michael made Fred do things he had never done before," Miss Charisse said.

It was the pointed distillations of everything from her ballet background to the demise of the Hollywood musical at press conferences in Lyons that made me want to hear more. During an interview the other day in her New York hotel, Miss Charisse displayed the same off-stage, high-heeled glamour, very much at odds with the severe aura she projects as a fading Russian ballerina in "Grand Hotel."

Anyone interested in seeing Miss Charisse in a turquoise leotard can, however, look at a current exercise video entitled "Cyd Charisse: Easy Energy Shape-Up." Many of the exercises she demonstrates are adapted from the ballet classes she began at age 6 and still takes in Los Angeles from Tatiana Riabouchinska, one of the famed "baby ballerinas" of the 1930's in Colonel de Basil's Ballet Russe. Miss Charisse had joined the troupe's corps as a 15-year-old from Texas after de Basil had recruited her and rechristened her with the two fake Russian names.

It was the Russian ballet connection that led Miss Charisse into a movie career. David Lichine, the choreographer and ballet star who was married to Miss Riabouchinska, asked her in 1943 to appear in a ballet role that he was choreographing for the film "Something to Shout About."

Unlike Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell and other American musical-comedy stars, Miss Charisse never danced a tap step on film. "Tap was against everything I had learned to do," she said. "I was pulled up as a ballet dancer, and I wasn't used to pounding the floor with bent knees."

Even her most famous co-stars had to adapt to her style. Yet Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were very different partners, as she explained: "Gene was always interested in ballet, and he was more of a ballet partner. He was more of a physical dancer. He pulled you around and was strong enough to do lifts."

When she danced with Astaire in Mr. Kidd's choreography and in the 1957 "Silk Stockings," choreographed by Eugene Loring, a well-known ballet figure who became a close friend, she found Astaire a "perfect partner," adding: "Fred moved like glass. Physically, it was easy to dance with him. It was not as demanding on me. I didn't need the same vitality and strength."

The Hollywood studio system groomed Miss Charisse for the qualities that set her apart, and today she is one of its most fervent defenders. "I never considered going into motion pictures," the dancer said, but the key to her career was a contract that brought her into the creative unit headed by the producer Arthur Freed at M-G-M.

If the great American musical has died, in Miss Charisse's view it is not only because there are no more composers like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin but because there is no support sytem. "The studio system just fell apart," she said. "Where do you go now to make a great musical? You don't have the music and you don't have the technology, although I know you have the dancers.

"M-G-M knew how to build stars. We used to do constant publicity stills. You were the Easter bunny one time and a Christmas tree the next. When I went to Japan, they knew who I was. Now you have a great actress and a year later, they ask, 'What happened to her?' "